CSENGELE, Hungary (AP) – In a small room filled with religious texts, a Jewish rabbi demonstrates how knives are sharpened and inspected before being used to cut the throat of chickens, geese and other birds in a kosher slaughterhouse in Hungary.
A shochet, someone trained and certified to kill animals according to Jewish tradition, sharpens a knife on increasingly thin stones before passing the blade through the nail to feel any imperfections in the steel that might inhibit a smooth and clean cut and cause pain unnecessary.
“One of the most important things in kosher is that the animal does not suffer,” said Rabbi Jacob Werchow, who oversees production at Quality Poultry, a 31/2 year old slaughterhouse that supplies nearly 40% of Europe’s kosher birds and a much of the foie gras sold in Israel.
The methods employed in the facilities of the village of Csengele are based on ancient Jewish principles that command the humane treatment of living creatures. They are also at the center of a debate on how to balance animal and religious rights, as parts of Europe effectively limit or ban Jewish and Muslim slaughtering practices.
Companies like Quality Poultry have found new export markets since the European Union’s highest court last month upheld a law in Belgium’s Flanders region that prohibited the slaughter of animals without first stunning them until they left them unconscious. But the European Court of Justice’s ruling also sparked fears of possible bans across the EU on ritual slaughter, and sparked memories of periods when Europe’s Jews faced cruel persecution.
“This decision does not only affect the Belgian Jewish community, it affects all of us,” said Rabbi Slomo Koves, of the Hungarian Association of Jewish Communities, which owns the Csengele slaughterhouse. “If this is the case in Belgium and the court has given moral approval, this could initiate proceedings on a larger scale. If you follow this logic, the next step is that you also cannot stop selling meat like that in these countries ”.
The EU has required pre-stunning animals since 1979, but allows member states to make exceptions based on religion. Most do this, but together with Flanders and the Walloon region in Belgium, Slovenia, Denmark and Sweden, as well as Switzerland, Iceland and Norway, not members of the EU, have eliminated religious exemptions, which means that kosher and halal meat must be imported.
Animal rights groups claim that slitting the throat of domestic animals and poultry while they are aware causes suffering that amounts to cruelty to animals. Stunning methods vary, but the procedure is most often performed using an electric shock or a pistol in the animal’s skull.
“Reversible stunning is the least we can do to protect animals,” said Reineke Hameleers, CEO of the Brussels-based Eurogroup for Animals. “They should be unconscious before they are killed.”
The situation is not so simple for religious observers. Jewish law prohibits injury or damage to animal tissue prior to slaughter, and modern stunning practices can cause death or irreparable injury that would make meat and poultry non-kosher, according to Koves.
Although some Muslim religious officials consider stunning before slaughter permissible, local Muslim groups have argued that the stunning requirements in Flanders and Wallonia resulted from efforts by the Belgian Islamic extreme right to harass their communities.
Rabbis Koves and Werchow said they believed that the kosher slaughter method, known as shechite, is no less human than the methods used in conventional meat production. In addition to the intensive process of sharpening and inspecting the knives, the shochet is trained to make the cut in one smooth motion, cutting the animal’s nerves and draining blood from the brain in seconds.
“Whatever you think … if kosher slaughter is better for the animal than normal slaughter, you’re basically putting animal rights before human rights,” said Koves. “If people are going to ban our rights to have kosher food, that means they are limiting our human rights. And that, especially in a place like Europe, brings very bad memories to us. ”
Laws requiring stunning before slaughtering animals appeared in some European countries as early as the late 19th century. Adolf Hitler ordered the practice in 1933, shortly after becoming Germany’s chancellor, one of the first laws imposed by the Nazis.
Jewish and Muslim groups challenged the Flanders law in Belgium’s Constitutional Court, which referred it to the European Court of Justice for a decision on its compatibility with EU law.
The Court’s attorney general advised the court to overturn the Flanders law, arguing that it violated the rights of certain religions to preserve their essential religious rites. But the court disagreed, considering that the law “allows a fair balance to be struck between the importance attached to animal welfare and the freedom of Jewish and Muslim believers to manifest their religion”.
The animal welfare minister in the Brussels region of Belgium, where stunning is not mandatory, said the decision would give fresh impetus to the debate on mandatory stunning there. The Brussels chapter of the New Flemish Alliance, a center-right party whose members led the pressure for law in Flanders, said it would now present a proposal for a decree to ban slaughter without stunning in the capital region.
The Hungarian government helped finance the slaughterhouse in Csengele, and Prime Minister Viktor Orban joined Jewish groups to condemn the court’s decision as an attack on religious freedom. In a January letter to the United States-based Jewish Agency for Israel, Orban wrote that his government “would spare no effort to raise our voice against (the decision) in all possible international forums”.
Koves and other chief rabbis in Europe are looking for ways to appeal the EU’s court decision.